by E. L. Carter
“When I cried in my room at night, she never came. There was no reason for the way she treated me.”
Mrs. Bird sees me. Oh, my god. I’ve spent my whole life fighting. I say, “When Avi asked me out, he crossed a line.”
“Into what?”
“Into this. Whatever we’re talking about. If I let him in—”
“There might be love.”
“I don’t know what to do with love.”
“It’s easier to hate it.”
“I hate having to suffer.”
“But you’re already doing that. If you love, at least you’ll be inside your own life.”
“Can I do it?”
“Yes.”
March 25
My milkweed. Dying babies! Iraq cursed with dying babies! How many times can a little life shrivel to nothing and show up alive again the next day? A vision—silky pods blown across the Sahara, fierce as the shamal wind. A mirage of milkweed.
Another desert. A tree reaches out to hold the furled brown burden that could be its leaves. One unfolds. An orange butterfly. It flicks upward. Following that speck of orange in the blue sky, the tree begins to shiver and it opens up, its weight seems freed from gravity, it flutters upward. Thousands of monarchs swirl in the updraft like leaves caught in a cyclone and hit the thermals headed south.
I almost couldn’t imagine that abundance even in the moment of watching it. And from here, from this moment, with the wind stealing my bloodflower’s chances? It has to be that beautiful. It has to carry with it into the sky wilted milkweed and cockroaches and dirt and garbage and the dead and dying and killing and the sadness, the bullet holes in a woman’s back, the soldier with his gun focused on whatever moves, the polluted river, the ancient ruins, and the grief and the rage and the powerlessness. It takes a lot of butterflies to lift a load like that.
April 5
IMAGO. I can tell the painted ladies by the way they beat their wings, flutter kicks through the eucalyptus. Curved leaves. Sweet oil. Color in motion. Inside, trapped in my cement prison, I imagine them. Who gives a rat’s ass about borders and war zones? IEDs, Apaches spitting down a lethal rainstorm? North! Fly north into spring!
Raheem is pacing again. Was he always this skinny? Bones hang on a shirt. I wish he would fucking be still! His face is young but already fallen. He says, “We need to go to Jordan.”
The teapot perches, bird on its cage, down-curved bill, a silver nectar probe. Sometimes it calls out. Now silent. “Do you have someone there?”
“Our sister married a Jordanian. They have offered to take us in for a while. But we lost all our money. The only thing we have now is my income selling phone cards. If we go there we’ll be foreigners with no income at all.”
“What was it like before the war?”
“We were well off. At the start, we said we should go there, to Jordan—”
“And then?”
His shoulders begin to curl in. The brave face of a man at war against grief. “I know it is Allah’s will but I don’t understand.” He reaches the end of the rug and turns on his heel, to make the journey back to the other side.
“Do you mean Laith?”
Raheem’s eyes begin to well up. He shakes his head no. His body has no weight. Where does he get the tears? I want to take him by the shoulders and stand him still, wipe his eyes with my shirtsleeve.
I say, “And then—”. I want to know where their money went, where Isra’s mother went. I want to tame them, like wild animals, make them understand I will bring food and water and only touch softly.
Raheem’s movement, rhythmical, from wall to window, window to wall, stops now.
“And then,” he says, “we have an American soldier bringing us gifts.” His face goes still like shock, the emotion drained out of it. “Do you understand, everyone is peeking out from behind their curtains. Our neighbors were our friends, and now everyone wants to call someone else the bad guy to keep himself alive.”
His Adam’s apple goes up and down in his throat. He says, “Do you understand that that’s how things are right now?”
I don’t know what to say. So I say what comes to my mind. “I followed a cloud of monarch butterflies once, all the way to Mexico. Have you ever seen a monarch?”
He shakes his head. I say, “They travel thousands of miles every year. No one knows how they know to follow the exact route of their great-great-grandparents. How do they know to land on the exact same tree, a thousand miles from where they were born? That’s what I want to understand.” Raheem is no longer crying. He says, “You have your beauty and your science, but I have Allah already.”
April 10
Connor has another chair now. Brown and orange vinyl, it’s straight out of a Salvation Army catalog and it makes a plasticky crackling sound when you sit on it. Connor doesn’t offer me the opportunity to make the chair crackle. He greets me at the threshold between the metal door and the chairs, where the walls are as blank and pale as a dead man’s face, and he leans his face so close I can see where he used to get blackheads on his nose when he was a kid. He says, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Private Urquhart?”
“Can you explain, sir?”
“I let you do a community service trip because I care about you. You needed to get your head out of what you did. And now I hear you’ve got your staff sergeant stopping to give aid every fucking morning. We’re not here to make friends. It’s not safe to make friends. Do you understand, Private?”
“I thought we were supposed to be building trust with the local populace, sir.”
“You know as fucking well as me that building trust doesn’t mean giving them a chance to attack. You know fucking well as me that there is no trust here, nothing and no one to trust.”
Did any of us really come here to feel like this? Maybe a few. Most of us came for something else, but now that we’ve been glared at and shot at and bombed I don’t know who’s left standing. Hate is just the natural, instinctive response to being despised.
I say, “They hate what we’ve done to their country but they don’t have to hate us. We just have to help them.”
“They need different help, Kris. Do you fucking understand? Either they will kill you or someone will kill them or you will all get killed.”
“I just want to love something, Connor. Someone. Something.”
“Do you want to kill what you love, dumb fuck? Is that love? Private?”
Fear is how we protect our broken hearts. It means nothing, nothing at all. I say “Is that all, sir?”
“Shut the fuck up!” He walks away, past the vinyl chair and the folding chair, past the poster of the soldier and the American flag, around his fake wood desk and into his fake leather chair, where he sits with a thump and puts his head in his hands.
There’s a clock on the wall. White paint. A landscape. Somewhere between one wall and the other are two men, each trying to make peace the best they can. Eventually Connor raises his head. “You’re dismissed, Private.”
Sucks to be him, I guess.
April 11
Listen, Isra, at the street corner. Speak, Isra, into your reflection on the soldier’s glasses at the roadblock. Look, Isra, into the window of the convoy through the smoky veil of kicked-up dust. Do you see me? Asalaamu Alaikum. Look them in the eye, speak softly, someone’s child.
BAGHDAD—AUGUST 2005
I dreamed the butterfly was gone this morning. Woke with my heart pounding, and looked through the grey light across the sleeping shape of the volunteer on the floor, to the second shelf. The rush began to subside and I could feel the familiar again—sheets against my side, sweat on my back where I’d been lying.
The nightmares come almost every night. A man with a gun chases me. A car explodes into light. The stories people tell me, recorded on my clipboard, bore their way into me as I sleep, like little glistening beetles—a tunnel, a cluster of eggs, and now the nymphs, these strange children, creep out into the darkness. Outside, the
snipers bang their deadly drums to the beat.
I asked Raed if he would try again to find the people I’m looking for. He looked at me when I asked, down the long exclamation point of his face, and didn’t answer. He’s right. What right do I have, in this burned-up, burned-out city of fear, to ask a man to risk death for me, an American on my own trifling mission?
The room begins to brighten toward morning, toward the waking part of the nightmare, the house with the gate and the stories that won’t stop, the endless flow of suffering. A ray of early sunlight, the kind that is thick with gold, finds its way across the air above the sleeping man and catches the edge of the butterfly’s wing. A shimmer. Something bright. A gift waiting to be received.
NEW JERSEY—JULY 2005
On the train to New York, Avi and I crane our necks like little children, make handprints on the glass. We laugh like teenagers, and the other passengers pretend to ignore us. We’re desperate, really, the way people love in wartime. We jam to the rhythm of the rail. We jam to the squealing of brakes. The songs hobos write. We’re obnoxious, but we don’t care.
At Penn Station we could go down and down again to travel under the city, but instead the upper world calls us away from the turnstiles and the pizza joints and the smoke shops, the buried labyrinth. Out of that maze, up the escalator into the air, into the blue sky so high above the tall buildings, and the sunlight like a stray dandelion, penetrating where it can take hold.
On this stinky avenue, Avi is a native flower. His long legs swing across the pavement without expending energy, like pendulums. His T-shirt has a picture of a Coke can on it, not new Coke or Classic Coke, but the kind like when we were kids. It’s tacky in New Jersey but here it’s perfectly at home. I once saw a completely naked man on a corner in the Village. He was casual as can be, just waiting for the walking green.
We walk north from Penn Station. Cars in droves. Taxis honking, the flashing lights of an ambulance. The echo of the street spirals up in the spaces between the buildings. Concrete, brick, tar, glass, a blended color that becomes the color of New York. In places the mortar crumbles. Cloth awnings with bleached-out edges. Avi pulls me inside his favorite church and we stand in sudden silence, a heavy wooden silence that defies the city outside. We retreat into the exhaust smell again, the sidewalk signs, and ahead the flash of Times Square.
Full of falafel, we wander for hours inside the Met, drifting from pink snow and a raven to the inside of a temple, from earth-red slashes on walls to clinging Hellenistic lovers. Eventually we stumble back down the wide steps, neither of us able to piece our words together in the right order anymore, only mumbling, “That sculpture—the light—did you see—”
“Oh, I saw a boat in one—almost purple, the wood—”
“No, the water—oh, I was thinking of the one by the elevator—”
Until we’re on a gravel path in the park, through the trees and edging toward the bright gleam of the meadow, and we both stop like tired horses in front of a hot dog vendor with a red and white umbrella.
“I thought you wanted to take me out to dinner.”
Avi ignores me and holds up two fingers like a peace sign. Takes the dogs on their checkered paper trays, hands me one, pays the vendor exact change, and smothers his dinner in ketchup, mustard, relish, and pickles. I grab a napkin and walk toward the meadow. The afternoon sun turns the grass green-gold and at the far end where we sit the trees cast a pattern over us, a thin and lacy garment of shade, too old-fashioned for the occasion.
Avi puts his hot dog on one knee of his crossed legs. “This,” he says, “is the best seating in Manhattan.”
I imagine the alternatives: a metal chair under an awning or an air-conditioned restaurant with linen-draped tables, either of which I thought meant a dinner date. I know he’s right but I want to outsmart the utter romance of two hot dogs and a patch of broken shade.
Avi has cut his hair short but it’s so thick it still resists conformity, swirling up like Van Gogh’s brushstrokes. He takes a bite of his dog.
“Women must think you’re a mess,” I say.
“As soon as I show them my kitchen sink they always disappear.”
“No one wants to see herself with a future in unpaid maid service.”
Avi swallows another bite and looks at me. “I’ve never asked anyone to be my maid.”
“You haven’t had to.”
He shakes his head. “God, my mother would spank me if she knew. I chase after goyim and leave out my dirty plates. I should just switch to paper. See?” He holds up his hot dog tray. “Easy.”
“But she doesn’t know.”
“Who can say? She’s dead.”
“Oh my god. You say that like it’s the weather.”
“Well, it was a long time ago. Believe me, it was weather when it happened.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s just a dull, constant ache, like arthritis.”
“So that’s what I have to look forward to.”
“Pretty much.”
“Do you want to tell me?” I ask.
“The story? It’s nothing. She just got sick and died, that’s all. Like one of those old brick buildings in Brooklyn that gets condemned. You know, along comes the great wrecking ball in the sky.”
“Man, it’s hard to be a kid in all that.”
“Oh, I was a kid.” He smiles. “She never let on. Dinner on the table, candles lit every Friday night, trips to Coney Island, a book before bed. Right up until the day she went to the hospital.”
“And then?”
“Then it was time for me to run wild in the street. Dad never thought twice about the dishes.”
“What was he so busy doing?” I consider my partially eaten hot dog, the ants in the grass waiting for their turn.
“Taking care of everyone else. You see, the doctor couldn’t save his own wife, so he had to save every man, woman, or child who crossed the threshold of his office thereafter.”
“Moving on wasn’t in his vocabulary.”
“You mean like Joseph remarrying after Mary died?”
“Was it that way for you too?”
He smiles, looks down at the grass. “I’m still single, aren’t I?”
“So it’s not just the dishes in the sink.”
“She used to say our family is all we’ve got. If she were still alive, I probably wouldn’t have taken her so goddamned seriously. But it’s not just her. It seems like everyone who could teach me about that is dead.” He starts tearing little pieces of grass. He lines them up in front of him like the bars between measures of music. “I’m thirty-five and I’m the family historian. I don’t even know who all’s been lost. So, being as I’m my best-known ancestor, I keep trying to live by what she said, and hoping somewhere along the way I’ll get it.”
“You mean that living will answer your questions.”
“I guess. I’ve never put it quite that way. I’m actually starting to think I’m doing it all wrong.” He scatters the blades of grass, then picks them up and starts to lay them out again.
“Is that what music is for you? A way to find an answer?”
“Maybe once. Now it’s more like a really, really good question.”
He goes back to arranging his grass and I let him. “My brother left me with a big question mark on my forehead,” I say. “I can’t get the right angle to see it and it doesn’t show up in the mirror.”
“So you’re trying to figure out what the question even is.”
“I guess. Something about my grandma. That’s all I can figure.”
He looks up now. “The one you wish you didn’t have.” When I flinch, he softens and asks, “What have you found out?”
“Not much. The problem with pariahs is that no one records their stories.”
“It’s frighteningly easy to make someone disappear.”
“I have a friend, an older woman, she knew my grandma. But not really. Only the story from the outside. And then there’s Google. Like,
if I get the right hit from Gypsy or Holocaust or Romani WWII, I’ll find her.”
“My life story, according to Wikipedia.”
“Something like that. I mean, what do you do?”
It was meant to be rhetorical, but Avi laughs. “I’ve done the same thing. Google. The Holocaust Museum. I went all the way to Auschwitz. I wonder if it would help you. I mean, working out how it feels to lose your brother. And helping that NGO helps me because I’m right there with what’s being lost now. The people. In some tiny way, maybe there will be less hurt this time. Even one less person hurt. In a different war she could have been my grandmother. Or yours.”
“Okay. So what exactly does this group do?”
“The nuttiest people in America go into Baghdad and find victims of war violence. Especially if it was done by the army. And they try to find out what these people need. And then they ask whodunit to help.”
“So you give them money?”
“And PR when I can. Do you want their info? Here, I’ll e-mail it to you just in case.” He pulls out his phone. “This is the woman who runs the office. She can tell you anything you need to know.”
“Okay, great.” I look at my phone. “Now I can patch up my guilt and move on.” I see him flinch out of the corner of my eye. I have him pinned. Remorseful, I continue, “I’m glad you’re still working it out too. Not finished, I mean. A little crazy. Like me.”
He smiles. “Is that why we like each other?”
“You travel all the way to Somerset County and meet its only Gypsy girl.”
“A Gypsy with panache. With good bones and lovely etiquette. Not like the ones under the bridge in Paterson.”
“Is that where they live?”
“There was a thing in the Times about it. There’s still a law against being a nomad. In other words, being a Gypsy is illegal.”
“That’s the story, isn’t it? Human rights don’t apply to Gypsies.”
“Well, they don’t make themselves very lovable.”
“You mean they haven’t agreed to be who other people want them to be. Some days I’d rather not be lovable either.”